CDP Institute

Digital identity is about trusting that someone is who they say they are – or, rather, finding ways to check their claim. It’s becoming more important to marketers as they rely more on first-party data. So you might care that identity network ID.me, which gives consumers control over their own credentials, recently raised a $100 million Series C. A bit before that, identity verifier Socure had its own $100 million round.

You might be surprised to learn that global trust levels actually increased a bit last year, according to the Edelman Trust Barometer.  But there were plenty of dark spots, including sharp declines in trust in the tech industry and media.  You can probably use the report to prove any point you want, although there’s no reason to think anyone would believe you.

Third party data isn’t dead or even dying: in fact, 78% of companies plan to increase their data acquisition budget in 2021, according to this Explorium study.  Demographics, company, financial, and anonymized individual data are the most common purchases, while business intelligence, advanced analytics, and predictive models are almost tied as the most common applications.

Small companies are heavily focused on personalization while bigger ones worry more about identity resolution, according to this Neilsen report.  Fewer than 20% of all sizes are very confident they have the right martech, between a quarter and a half plan to increase martech spend in the next year, and bigger companies are much more interested in second party data.  Good stuff.

Mobile marketing platform Airship has added Live Chat, an option that watches online customers and offers to chat when it spots an opportunity or problem.  Triggers can be based on a combination of behavior, location, lifecycle events, and journey status.  Customers will be grateful or creeped out, or maybe a bit of both.

In other non-avian tracking news, Verizon Media has partnered with Catalina to combine Catalina’s retail purchase data on 236 million individuals with Verizon’s information about the online activities of the 900 million-ish people in its global ID graph.  The company announcement says the combined data will be used to measure campaign performance.  There’s no mention of using it to target ads at individuals.

ID5 also asks consumers for consent to a first-party tracking cookie that is shared by a network of Web sites.  There are probably technical differences vs SWAN but what really matters is no birds are involved.  ID5 was launched in 2017 and says it reaches more than 600 million consumers daily.  They just raised a $6 million Series A.

The horrifying plague of bird-themed advertising ID solutions has expanded with SWAN, a proposal for an open-source network that lets consumers consent to being tracked, drops a first party cookie with a unique ID, and then applies that consent and the cookie across many participating Web sites. The concept has backing from adtech companies including Zeta Global, 51Degrees, Open X, ENGINE Media Exchange (EMX), PubMatic, Rich Audience and Sirdata. I’d like it better if SWAN didn’t also offer SWIFT and OWID.

Braze has released a Customer Engagement Index that measures brands’ sophistication across twelve competencies. One intriguing gap: while 80% of companies execute campaigns across multiple channels and 54% say they do this in a single system, just 10% personalize their communications in real time. On the other hand, 57% of companies in this Reflektion survey said they react in real time to customer behavior on their Web site.

Data integration platform MarkLogic is also hopping on the citizen-whatever bandwagon, offering a new “low-code/no-code” user interface for their Data Hub. Again, what’s special is the scope spans the entire data integration process. MarkLogic works with all kinds of data but puts unified customer view at the top of its applications list.

Cheetah Digital is the latest company to add self-service predictive modeling to its system, launching “Citizen Data Scientist” complete with guided workflows, easy integration with training data, and posting of results onto customer records. The key point is they cover the whole process from data prep through deployment, not just building the models themselves.

Switching gears: the Marketing AI Institute (no relation) reports that AI is still an aspiration for most companies: just 17% of marketers said it’s deployed widely at their company, although 80% think more than a quarter of their tasks will be automated five years from now.  Lack of training was by far the most common barrier (70%); poor technology and data were far down the list at 35% and 31%, respectively.